Carbohydrate Diet

And more recently, a study published in Circulation by the team in Helsinki showed that those with high triglycerides plus an unfavorable LDL HDL cholesterol ratio could lower their heart attack risk rate by 71% when these problems were corrected.

These very large studies have set many of our leading medical scientists on a course of rethinking. More and more of them are beginning to question whether the high carbohydrate diets recommended for heart patients may not be so ideal as has been supposed.

Framingham director William Castelli, M.D. commented: âœThe findings swing the pendulum and show that high triglycerides can be a significant risk factor for some patients.â relation between the level of cholesterol circulating in the blood and risk of heart disease.

It has, after all, been consistently shown that triglycerides parallel the insulin level and that the control of insulin levels can be done with supreme effectiveness on a low carbohydrate diet. Grey and Kipnis demonstrated this in the early 70s. In 1979, Dr. Sheldon Reiser did a study with human volunteers demonstrating that a diet providing 18% of its calories from sugar and this is now less than the U.S. national average produced significantly higher lipid and insulin concentrations than did a diet with 5% of its calories derived from sugar.

Among the many scientists who have begun to respond to this really formidable array of evidence, I would first like to mention the distinguished Stanford professor, Dr. Gerald Reaven, and his associate, dietetics expert Ann Coulston. Reaven has been pursuing the close connection between hyperinsulinism, hypertension, and cardiovascular risk factors with indefatigable zeal for almost twenty years now.

He was the pioneer, but since 1985, more than a dozen major articles in the leading medical journals have followed in his lead.16 One piece of the puzzle that Reaven showed was that hypertension which no serious medical theorist has ever questioned as a risk factor for both stroke and heart disease is intimately related to hyperinsulinism. In 1989, in a major article in The American Journal of Medicine titled âœHypertension as a Disease of Carbohydrate and Lipoprotein Metabolism,â he wrote, âœPatients with untreated hypertension have been shown to be resistant to insulin stimulated glucose uptake and both hyperinsulinemic and hypertriglyceridemic…â